Sunday 28th April
I stand at the kitchen island slicing strawberries, pulling off the green leaves and stems and cutting them into quarters. My fingers turning pink with their juice, those tiny strawberry hairs sticking to my skin.
The sun is streaming in through the windows, warming the kitchen, as I shake jam sugar over the pile of strawberries; a squeeze of lemon juice and a layer of crumpled up parchment paper to tuck them into their bowl. I leave them to macerate, the sugar drawing the juice from the fruit, the juice melting the sugar crystals, turning them to a syrup.
There is so much fruit in the preserving pan that it almost boils over. The syrup boiling and rolling, foaming like lava right to the top of the pan. I stir and stir, raising and lowering the heat until the liquid reduces and calms down enough to be left on a steady bubble, thickening slowly, starting to jam.
I test for a set on cold plates from the fridge. Waiting for the glossy, ruby jam to wrinkle on the surface. I let it settle before I skim the top, removing any foam that doesn’t disappear on its own. The jars are hot from the oven and the jam sizzles as it hits the glass, boiling up again, sending puffs of sweet strawberry into the air. I screw a lid onto each searingly hot jar and turn it upside down to check the seal, leaving them on the side to cool. The strawberry section of the jam shelf restocked just as the season starts to get busy.
[My strawberry jam recipe, and a recipe for a very creamy rice pudding to eat with it, will be going out in the next château newsletter. If you don’t already get our château news you can sign up here.]
Monday 29th April
The nightingale is singing, its trills and whistles, curling melodies and at times almost sad songs, call from the tree-tops for a mate. A love song sent into the sky. I hope he finds someone soon - not least because it is three o’clock in the morning and his pleas for attention have filtered through our bedroom window and woken me up for the third night running. I let him sing me back to sleep, his notes still ringing out at dawn.
A heavy spring mist is hanging over the fields, draping itself around the house and making everything muffled. Monty and I walk through its dampness, dew on every surface, the rising sun diffused behind the mist, making it glow with a white light that seems to come from everywhere, stealing the shadows.
While our guests eat breakfast, I snap asparagus stalk after asparagus stalk, setting the woody stems to simmer in the stock pot. I chop the rest, stirring it through some onions and fennel that have been frying and sweetening gently in butter for a good while.
I strain the stock and add it to the pot, it has the briefest of simmers, before I blitz it in batches in the blender until it’s silky smooth. A little cream, some salt and pepper. A spring soup for tonight’s starter.
Tuesday 30th April
We wave off the guests and the camera crew arrive, Dom and Sophie, here for two days to capture some work in the cutting garden. I’m building little makeshift fences around my cutting garden beds, foraging poles from the woods and lashing them together with string.
Tim is helping; the camera crew a helpful excuse to get him involved in a job he’d usually do anything to avoid. I can see him despairing at my haphazard twisting of strings to hold the poles of my fences together. Screws, he says, would be far more practical. But this is not the point, the string looks prettier, and the little fences aren’t structural, they’re just to support the stems, hide the netting that I put in place for my flowers to grow through, they’re there just to stop everything flopping by late summer.
The sun is warm on my back as I stoop over the bed to plant snapdragon seedlings. I will them to grow quickly, making the most of the space and the soil to shoot upwards. Everything takes longer with a film crew in tow. A few fences built and just one bed planted up, the rest will have to wait for another day.
Wednesday 1st May
The camera crew are back today to film a master interview. Tim and I sit side-by-side in the salon, answering questions about our life here, our plans, our château journey so far. Dom asks how much there is still to do? We laugh and say so much, so so much, but our pace has slowed as we juggle the business and the boys and renovating rooms. It’s hard not to think we should be further on as we head towards our seventh year here.
But in answering their questions I realise that we’re tired. That these last two winters of tackling the damage to the salon and renovating the boot room have been enough. The bigger projects just feel too much right now. The first five years here were so intense. That huge push in the first year to open the business and get the house playing her part, learning how to renovate and restore this place as we went along. Filming, creating rooms for a bed and breakfast, working out how to run a bed and breakfast and easing into a new life in a new country. In our second year we juggled renovation work, filming and guests, working every hour of the day learning the business, creating more guest bedrooms and trying to let the cameras catch it all.
Then came the two years of Covid which almost destroyed everything we’d worked so hard for. We tried to keep positive, working on the gîte renovation alone with the last of our savings and no one to help. Trying to turn an old outbuilding into a holiday cottage and home school and entertain two young boys at the same time, all with the very real and terrifying threat of losing our home hanging over our heads, as the confinements just kept coming and the guests stayed away.
I realise as we’re talking, answering all the questions, that the last two years have been a recovery of sorts. We’ve clung on, worked long hours, saved our business through sheer determination and have slowly clawed our way back to where we might have been without those two lost years. But we are tired.
At the end of the day I stand looking out at the rain soaked garden. I light a candle for May Day - the half way point between the spring solstice and midsummer, and I think that right where we are is just fine. We’ll get to the next stage of renovations when we feel the time is right. We don’t want to cut corners or feel under pressure. We’ll save again to make the next stage of renovations possible, but we’ll do it at our own pace, with time for life with our boys in between.
Thursday 2nd May
I sleep for 10 hours, the busyness of the last month suddenly hitting me hard. My body is heavy with sleep as I force myself up and out. We have guests arriving this afternoon, this is the true beginning of the season, there will be guests everyday now until October.
I cut flowers from the polytunnel, more ranunculus to mix with apple mint, guelder rose and hawthorn. I save as many of last week’s flowers as I can. Washing out the vases, recutting the stems and only mixing old flowers with old and new with new, to help every vase to last as long as possible.
We welcome back familiar faces along with our new guests. It’s so lovely when folks come back to see us time and again, we know then that we’re doing something right.
Friday 3rd May
Time slips away today, we clean rooms and prepare the gîte for our next guests, ducking in and out between heavy rainstorms that pummel the garden, the briefest patches of sun in between.
There is so much rain that by mid-afternoon there are huge puddles of standing water on the drive. I scrape a channel in the mud of the verge with the heel of my boot, clearing a passage for the water to drain into the old ditch. It begins to trickle away, but more is coming, flowing from the fields in a little stream down the drive to pool in this sunken patch of our tree-lined country lane. I wonder if the summer will be dry and hot, whether there will be droughts and hose pipe bans still after all of this rain? More rain is forecast for the weekend; no dry days promised until next Wednesday. My seedlings will have to bide their time in their pots for a little longer.
Saturday 4th May
The first roses are blooming in the garden, a few dog roses opening in the hedgerows. The hawthorn blossom seems to be especially spectacular this year. I wonder if the mild and wet winter will lead to an abundance of berries later in the year?
The elderflower tucked into the entrance of the woods has enough flowers for a first batch of cordial. It’s always first this tree. It catches a little sunlight as it sits beside the path to the drive, but is tucked away enough beneath the taller trees to be sheltered from frosts and high winds. I snip off any flower heads I can reach, wading into the nettles at the foot of the tree to pull higher branches towards me, jumping to catch the tips of the tallest ones.
Back in the kitchen I bring a pan of sugar and water to the boil, slice lemons and pick over the flowers. I plunge the flower heads into the sugar syrup with the lemons and a little citric acid. Already the bright floral scent is rising from the bowl. I’ll leave it for a good 24hrs though, allowing the flavours to seep into the syrup. The first of many batches done, ready to be stirred into gin and tonics or a glass of Crémant de loire on a warm summer night on the terrace under the stars.
I’d love your help
There are so many stories to tell, but sometimes it’s hard to know what to share, hard to guess what you’ll all be interested in. So I thought I would ask. What do you want to know? What do you love to hear about? What questions do you have about living in France, owning a château, creating a business, renovating an old house? What stories do you want me to answer. It would be so helpful if you could leave me a comment, send me an email or write me a note to let me know what you’d like to read about here.
Thank you so much
Rebecca x
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I think, when the busy season has passed, you should think about doing a book of château recipes and include some of your beautiful photos. I love seeing and hearing about the things you make and quite often look through your website for particular recipes that I remember you making. Not some massive thing but almost like a notebook - spiral bound - I know I’d buy it and I bet a lot of other people would too!😊. Totally agree that your Sunday diary is the calm before the normal stuff begins - I genuinely make sure my iPad is charged on Saturday night so I can wake up to your life in France in the morning.
Agree with others, my Sunday read of your stories with a cuppa, is my time to immerse myself in French life - albeit yours! 😊 Love the mix of garden and cookery/recipe notes, as well as the renovation work, family stuff and just anything really. Weirdly, it's stuff you may think of as mundane that is often the most interesting to read! x